Wen | Xu Lihong
The editorial | is as it is now
"Father Trapped in Time", released by the All-China Federation of Arts, has a box office of nearly 30 million yuan in the past month of release, scoring 9.2 points in Maoyan, 9.1 points in ticket sales, 8.7 points in Douban, and 92% recommendation degree in Weibo Big V, and has received warm support from more than 700,000 viewers.
"Father Trapped in Time" is based on the 2012 play of the same name by French novelist and playwright Florian Zeller, which won the 93rd Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and gave 83-year-old Anthony Hopkins the title of "Movie Emperor" after 1993's "The Silence of the Lambs." The original play was widely acclaimed by critics as soon as it was staged in London's West End, winning the Best Play Award in Molière in France and being considered "the most popular new play of the last decade". The film version, which is no less than the original, has ingeniously built a memory labyrinth about time in a visual way, and creatively adapted this spiritual story that touches on the common dilemmas of life.
For the film adaptation of the drama, how to retain the essence of the original drama while visually presenting it by film means, and transforming the drama story from stage discourse to film discourse is a crucial core issue, which depends on the degree of understanding of the adaptor's understanding of the laws of drama and film aesthetics. Compared with many theaterwrights and directors who have failed to cross from theater to film, as a playwright who has directed films for the first time, Florian Zeller has undoubtedly achieved remarkable artistic achievements. In an interview with the Financial Times, Zeller made it clear that "I want to enter an unknown world of cinema, not to continue the style of theatre I am good at".
john k M. Desmond (John M.) M. Desmond and Peter Hawkes call the series of strategies for adaptors to move stories from stage to screen "Opening Up" and propose seven strategies: "visualizing scenes implied or mentioned in plays," "visualizing literary symbols and ideas," "using cameras and clips to transform stories into the temporal and spatial structure of the film," and "adding music." Florian Zeller used these strategies flexibly in "Father Trapped in Time", which made the film an artistic success.
No. 1
Visualize scenes implied or mentioned in the play
Strongly influenced by the enigmatic narratives of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965) and Michael Haneke's Amour (2012), Zeller and his co-screenwriter Christopher Hampton and art designer Peter Francis (Peter Francis and photographer Ben Smithard co-designed a labyrinth of memories for 80-year-old Alzheimer's Anthony, a London apartment.
Zeller argues: "We can only develop empathy if we try to tell this story from within. I want to use such a scene, a maze to present that feeling of disorientation, so that the audience can experience this feeling. "Therefore, this apartment is not only an important character in the whole story, but also an external visual representation of Anthony's spiritual space. The complex structure of the film's narrative and Anthony's lost memories are achieved through subtle changes in space on the film's timeline. To this end, many doors and corridors have been designed in the layout of the entire apartment, and the lights, colors, and sets change over time. When the same lens enters the same space, there are already subtle changes. For example, in the first 10 minutes of the film, the color of the apartment is green and yellow, but as the narrative progresses, the apartment begins to turn blue and gradually fades.
No. 2
Visualize literary symbols and ideas
Zeller designed two important images in the film: the watch and the tree. Among them, Anthony's "looking for a lost watch" has become an important plot throughout the film. At the beginning of the film, Anthony complains to his daughter Anne that Angela, a caregiver, stole his watch. Since then, this metaphor of time has repeatedly appeared, becoming an important visual representation of the protagonist's memory dislocation, and also hinting at Anthony's powerlessness to try to maintain order as the temporal and spatial order gradually disappears.
Another image related to the theme of the film is the "tree". In the nursing home scene at the end of the film, Anthony, who is completely lost in the whirlpool of memory, cries bitterly: "I feel as if all my leaves are going to fall out..." The film's final shot also ends with a tree swaying in the wind outside the window, refining this metaphorical story of love and loss through figurative visual imagery, which shows the director's artistic skills. And unlike the warm external perspective of Taiwanese director Yang Lizhou,000 in the documentary "Forgotten Time", which also tells about Alzheimer's patients, "Father Trapped in Time" extends the brushstrokes to the depths of everyone's heart, triggering the audience's thinking about life issues.
No. 3
Use cameras and clips
Transform the story into the temporal and spatial structure of the film
The director's concept of theatrical time and space and the film time and space is the key to whether a drama can successfully achieve cinematic adaptation. In respect of the aesthetic laws of theatrical art, flexible and changeable lens scheduling and editing can not only enhance the portrayal of the psychology of the characters and control the rhythm of the film, but also enhance the audience's sense of substitution and psychological identity, and achieve a stronger artistic appeal than traditional stage performances.
"Father Trapped in Time" truly simulates the psychological state and perspective of Alzheimer's patients through scene scheduling and editing, so that the audience has a strong empathy for Anthony. In particular, the clever editing of Yorgos Lamprinos allows the film to "move from the stagnation of the stage to the fluid state of cinematization", breaking the concept of time and space of the theatrical stage and realizing the transformation of the dramatic story into the temporal and spatial structure of the film.
No. 4
Add music
In addition to the above adaptation strategy, Zeller also made full use of sound means to help shape the character image. For example, the choice of opera score three times in the film is closely related to Anthony's state of mind and forms a strong intertextuality. When Anthony first appeared, he was sitting by the window listening to the "cold song" passage in the "King Arthur" suite by the British royal composer Henry Purcell, and the lyrics of John Dryden directly implied that the protagonist Anthony was in the predicament of life in the cold winter of life.
At the beginning of "The Next Day", the director arranges for Antony to listen to the most famous aria "The Holy Goddess" from the Italian opera Bellini's masterpiece "Norma", in the kitchen, which is a sharp contrast to the protagonist's panic when he finds a strange man "Paul" in his home. In the passage home from the hospital, the soundtrack adopts the aria "I feel like I am in the flowers" from Bizet's opera "Pearl Diver", which accurately sets off Anthony's lonely and sad mood at this moment.
The author believes that in addition to the above successful drama adaptation film strategy, it is worth learning from domestic films,
Zeller's creative concept in "Father Trapped in Time" also needs to be paid attention to in two aspects: giving the audience initiative and diversified film situation design.
The former is mainly influenced by David Lynch's creative tendency to "leave space for the audience", and the long-term practical experience of theatrical creation has also made Zeller think that the creator must "believe in the audience", that the audience should be in a positive state, become part of the narrative and question everything. Zeller once described the film as a "puzzle": "You can play with all the pieces, find the right combination, make sense of it." In contrast, Chinese film directors are generally more inclined to manipulate narratives and output concepts, rather than actively delegating power to the audience through the exploration of film art forms, allowing the audience to actively participate in the film narrative and form an effective interaction between the two. Secondly, most of the current Chinese films, which are influenced by the concept of realism and realism, have a relatively single film situation design, and artistic creativity and imagination need to be further enhanced. "Father Trapped in Time" allows us to discover the extraordinary imagination and great potential of film audiovisual situational conception, and these creative experiences are undoubtedly of vital significance to the development of Chinese cinema in the future.
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